Robin's comments (member since May 06, 2008)

Robin's comments from the Guilty Pleasures group.

Andrew Holleran’s DANCER FROM THE DANCE was the first gay novel I read, and it was so depressing I almost didn’t read any more. John Rechy’s CITY OF NIGHT was even more dark and nearly did me in!

But I didn’t give up. I went on to THE FRONT RUNNER (Patricia Nell Warren), which was lovely if a little saccharine, and then BOY MEETS BOY (David Levithan) finally made me say, “All right, my turn!” I really wanted to write books that were well written, that didn’t necessarily end in unmitigated hopelessness, that weren’t all about the act of sex, and that didn’t paint rainbows and flowers across every page. I didn’t see that out there, so I started writing.

A SECRET EDGE and THINKING STRAIGHT are my two published books so far, and both of them tell hopeful stories about boys in real life situations. Maybe they won’t be the first books you’ve read, but I hope you’ll give them a try!

I wish that those who try to use the tactics in the scriptures as though they were themselves absolute would go and study the way Jesus spoke to the scribes and pharisees. He yelled at them for treating the law as though the law itself were sacred. It is not. He told his followers, in essence, love God, and love each other; these are the two greatest commandments, and all the law depends on them.

Arlie -- EXACTLY! The word "homosexual" didn't even exist until the late nineteenth century, which tells you that the lifestyle, or the idea of someone who identified according to this description, couldn't predate the year 1800 by much, let alone make sense to the writers (or original readers) of biblical scripture.

People in biblical times, and for quite some time thereafter, didn't marry for love; they married out of necessity. They needed children to take care of them in their old age (you, like, 35), so they married very, very young. And they didn't have time to sit around navel-gazing to figure what would make their lives fulfilling; they just survived. So by the time someone figured out they were gay, they were already married with kids.

Plus, the OT -- especially in the early books where we see same-sex relations condemned -- was written in large part to purify and then expand the Jewish tribes. And they believed that male ejaculate contained all the necessities of human life, which meant women were merely ovens. So a man who wasted seed in ANY way was a murder. God killed Onan for spilling his seed upon the ground rather than have mandated sex with his brother's widow.

You won't find anything about woman/woman relations in the OT, either; women didn't matter. Neither did homosexuality, except that it wasted seed, in effect killing an unborn Jewish baby.

So there were homosexuals, but no homosexuality. It couldn't have existed. And the condemnation is against adultery and wasting seed and prostitution and violence and pederasty. Not same-sex relations per se.

Hey, Courtney -- If you go to google, click on the shopping button, and search for rainbow doormats, you'll find them at Aqua Superstore in three different sizes. Here's the link for the 18x30 one:
http://www.aquasuperstore.com/detail.asp...

Have fun!

Heather, "tangent" all you want. I'm so glad I opened this thread, and I hope we'll talk more about the initial idea, but I absolutely love how inclusive and open and honest everyone seems to be, whatever the most recent layer is.

Courtney, thanks for pointing us toward Heather's blog; I haven't read it but will do so very soon. I also hope anyone who has a few minutes will read mine. I'm writing an open letter to humanity entitled "The Case for Acceptance." It's kind of fiction, since I'm writing from the POV of a gay man (which I am not), but my intent is to demonstrate through logic, physical and social sciences, psychology, and -- finally -- religion, that the only thing wrong with being gay is how some people treat you when they find out.

So you can see it on my goodreads profile page in the "Robin's Writings" section, or you can go to my blog at http://www.robinreardon.blogspot.com. I'd love to how what you think of it so far. There will be ten installments in all; three are available now, with a new one each month.

I'd like to say again how delighted I am at the integrity of this group of people for this discussion. So many times you see rancor, anger, nasty language -- so unnecessary. Anyway, thank you all!

Scott -- Good point, and I apologize if I've offended anyone. Also, I do hope that I made it clear in a previous post that I would never try to pull/push someone out of the closet. That's their decision and no one else's. It's just that the more people who are out, the better it will eventually be for all.

Courtney said: "I really try to be as [much] myself as possible, no matter how uncomfortable it makes people..." I support this attitude, with a caveat. It is not Courtney's (or anyone's) job to make others comfortable; that's up to them. This is especially true in being true to oneself, and it seems Courtney is true to herself. Kudos! And courage.

That said, I think there's little to be gained through aggressive extremeism. (Courtney, I'm NOT saying this is you; I don't think it is. I just want to express a position and use a non-LGBT example.) I'm part Irish, and yet one day in traffic when I saw a bumper sticker that read "God Made the Irish #1!" it made my hackles rise. It was like, what's the rest of me -- chopped liver?

For the person driving that car, this bumper sticker feeds the tribal, primordial part of the brain that needs to feel better, stronger, superior, and more righteous (in the case of religion, for example) than others. (Ironically, it also feeds a trible need for homogeneity.) But the number of people who read that sticker and who feel good about it are a few grains of sand on an eternal beach, compared to those who, like me, bridled. If someone wanted to think of the Irish (and I don't, BTW) as a bunch of dirty potato-eaters, that bumper sticker gives them a good excuse. And if someone was trying NOT to think of the Irish that way, it will push them in the wrong direction.

So while I love "We're here; we're queer. Get used to it!" at an HRC rally, for example, I don't recommend it as a bumper sticker that would be read indiscriminately by an audience over which I have no control. I'd rather appeal to the reasoning, cerebral cortex part of people's brains if I can reach it, than to the non-rational, non-verbal, non-thinking lizard brain (officially, the R-25 complex, where R=Reptilian) that knows only knee-jerk, gut-instict reactions independent of the human part of who we are.

And I really think that the lizard brain response plays a HUGE part in the issue with which I opened this thread: the refusal of some people to listen to reason, or to use their own reasoning powers, when it comes to God's take on homosexuality. Anyone with half a brain can see -- if they put their lizard brain behind them and engage their cerebral cortex -- that homosexuality per se DID NOT EXIST in biblical times. Any biblical times. So anything we read in the bible about it was talking about something else. Oh, there were gay people -- the same percentage that there are today, no doubt -- but they didn't have the luxury of thinking about what would make them happy/unhappy, so they led the lives they had to lead so they could survive day to day. But homosexuality, as we know it today, did not exist. Even the word did not exist until the late 19th century, so when it appears in the bible it's a modern translation of something else.

Jesus was all about love. And he warned that there would be people who say they are with God but are not. And how will we know those people? They won't be all about love. They'll be about hatred and judgement and divisiveness and accusation and isolation and knee-jerk reations to things they don't understand.

Sorry for the rant; sometimes I just can't help myself...

LOL! I love it: "Uncle Tom lesbian." Courtney, I think I know what you're saying. And it's not very far away from the idea that critics of gays are less likely to criticize the ones they know and like. So the question is whether it's easier for these individuals to like gays who are not kd, not over the top (by their own definition, that is). Another way to put it might be that they're okay with gays who don't make them feel 'too' uncomfortable.

But I'm still hoping that the discomfort will lessen more and more -- with more and more exposure to gays -- and that eventually that line that separates the ones who are Ellen from the ones who are kd will shift further and further toward kd until even she doesn't make them so uncomfortable any more.

Tolerance is a word that comes to mind. Personally, I'd take tolerance over hatred, but who wants to be tolerated? You tolerate something you would rather not deal with because you believe it's going to end. I'll tolerate tolerance because I'm expecting it to end.

Lynne said: "it's harder for people to vote for and go along with prejudice when they have to realize that that prejudice affects the people they know, love, and respect."

Also, though I would never try to pull someone out of the closet (it's a personal decision in the ultimate, after all), I do think that the more people who are out, the more likely it is that heteros would learn to "get used to it." You can't get used to something that isn't there. But the more gay people heteros know, the less uncomfortable (or worse) they might be.

How many times have you heard someone say, "I don't know any gay people." Yeah, right...

Courtney said, "I am sure if Ruth and Esther were actually "caught" in the act, they would have been stoned or some such thing."

Possibly true; the biblical text doesn't provide much in the way of clues to that answer. But I think it's also possible that it would have meant nothing. In the bible's early days, it was customary for people (read "men") to own many wives, if the man's rank and wealth were high enough. And they probably knew what was going on inside the red tent and didn't care. It wasted no seed and affected no one. No people, that is.

Courtney asked above if anyone had tried to have this discussion with a biblical literalist. I’d love the opportunity, but I don’t know very many. Perhaps I should have opened this thread in a different group! LOL

I have had an exchange, however, with a non-literalist Christian who condemns homosexuality based on biblical scripture, which is just bo-o-o-o-o-o-o-gus. (Bad enough that the literalists do it!) I was responding to a post on amazon where this person had said that the bible was against homosexuality b/c it was unnatural. To which I responded that it couldn’t be unnatural when it occurs in over 1,500 different animal species (and counting). He replied, “And animals eat their young. Should we imitate them?” So you see the non-literalists are capable of being just as irrational. I had to remind him that wasn’t the point; I had NOT used animal behavior to justify homosexuality, I had used it as supporting evidence of the phenomenon occurring in nature, being biological. He went off on some tangent, equally off-point. I stopped exchanging posts with him; he was obviously not using his brain, though he was convinced of the opposite. He was just responding from his gut and calling it scripture.

Right! In fact, the victorious soldiers in battles would usually rape the vanquished ones -- despite the edict against "wasting seed" -- b/c it was a powerful way of demeaning someone.

As Alex points out, there was no way to have m/m penetrative sex and have it be good, in the eyes of the OT writers and "readers." Not only b/c women were almost not even human to them, but also because by the time anyone was old enough to rub two gray cells together about whether he or she didn't really enjoy this mixed-sex thing very much, they were already married, and having as many kids as possible to take care of them when they got to be too old (like, 40?) to care for themselves any more. No social security, no health insurance, no pensions, no tax-sheltered annuities, no graduated health care facilities. So everyone was straight by default, and there was no concept of m/m or f/f committed relationships. So everything you see in any part of the bible that refers to same-sex anything is NOT talking about the same thing we are today when we speak of homosexual relationships.

Scott -- Yeah, I love that seemingly deliberate misunderstanding about Sodom. And something most readers either don't see or choose to ignore is that when the rabble showed up at Lot's door and demanded that the strangers be sent out to them, what did Lot do? He offered up his two virgin daughters and told the crowd, "Do with them as you see fit."

!!!?!???!!! And God deemed Lot worth saving!

Now it's possible that in that day and age, this wouldn't have been frowned upon by society because women were, after all, barely above camels in terms of value of life. And everyone knew that all the essentials for a new human life were in male ejaculate; the woman was just an oven. (No joke; this was common belief in the Middle East.)

Hmmm... maybe THAT's why wasting one's seed was so bad? If you didn't put it into the oven, anyplace else was a sin, because you were essentially murdering! Outside the oven would include masturbation, oral sex, bestiality and... oh yes... sex between men. Small wonder that the Old Testament said nothing about female-female activity; no one (that is, no men, for men were people) cared about women at all.

IMHO, this speaks HUGELY to context.

I make the case in my second novel, THINKING STRAIGHT, for the necessity of using our brains and not just our eyes and ears when we apply Christian scripture to life. The book tells the story of a Christian gay teen who is put into a deprogramming camp to straighten him out.

Recently I participated in a couple of amazon discussions around the general topic of Christianity's view of homosexuals. Many other participants referred to scripture as though it were absolute, once and for all. Often they quoted scripture in their arguments as though it would help, which reminded me of those who raise their voices as if that would help foreign-speakers understand their words.

So many people read or hear only the words of scripture and insist that's enough, despite the many ways in which scriptural instructions change from book to book, as time progresses and as different people in different situations are being addressed. We don’t even need to get into how many different copies and translations and versions have led to the current books today (particularly with the New Testament books) to see that the bible changes its moral instructions over time; even those who believe that the books of the bible are the inerrant, divine, immutable Word of God can see these changes.

I'm hoping for some thoughtful discussion of why so many Christians (not all, by any means) are so unwilling to consider the *context* of scripture. And why they don't allow that the differences between the context of thousands of years ago and that of today should be considered when trying to understand the nature of, and our relationship to, God. Because while the nature of God may not have changed, the ways in which we live – and the things we know about life – have changed radically. And the scriptures themselves changed as their audiences' lives changed. The nature of God is strategic; "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not" are tactical. And tactics are not absolute; they must fit the situation, or they're useless at best. The bible itself changed tactics as the situation changed over time.

Most of us would agree, I believe, that when reading literature, context is critical. Understanding is deeper if readers have some information about the historical period, about the writer, and about the writer’s audience when the work was written.

I know there are those who would say that the bible is not “literature.” But isn’t context even more critical when the writing is used by many as justification to condemn? As The Reverend Dr. Laurence C. Keene says, “You can have a fifth grade understanding of the Bible – if you're in the fifth grade."

Because I consider context to be critical to understanding, I think it makes no sense to condemn gays based on biblical scripture that was written for people with an ancient and flawed understanding of homosexuality.

Thoughts?

I read the book several months ago. I write so differently from this style (A SECRET EDGE and THINKING STRAIGHT, both about gay teens with a very different approach to relationships from Elio's) that it was at times refreshing and at times frustrating.

Here's the review of Aciman's book that I put on my author page:
This book took me by surprise. Most of the story takes place over a summer in Italy and on the surface seems like the ramblings of a young man obsessed with someone he expects to see only for that summer. While I enjoyed the writing, I kept waiting for something to happen. What I didn't realize was that something was happening without my awareness. By the time I finished, I realized that I'd been lured into emotional, psychological quicksand. And I didn't want out.

Lisa – Keep writing! I’m not only a woman, but I’m also straight, and I have two published novels with gay male protagonists: A SECRET EDGE, and THINKING STRAIGHT. I have a third novel that my agent is currently shopping to publishers, and a fourth that I’m about half finished with, also with gay male protagonists.

For me, the key was to find something special for each book to center around. SECRET EDGE looks on the surface like a coming out story for a 16-year-old, but it also contains themes around non-violence, Hindu philosophy, and a few other topics you don’t see in every book. THINKING STRAIGHT tells the story of a Christian gay teen whose parents put him into an ex-gay camp to straighten him out, and instead of making it a story about how terrible a thing this is (which it is, no debate), the protagonist finds a way to live his religion and be true to himself, and he helps others do the same.

No one I contacted – from finding an agent to shopping publishers – ever expressed any concerns. Some of them may have been surprised, but if so they didn’t say that to me. Many reviewers of my work still think I’m a gay man (the name probably fools them). I’ve had a couple of interviewers who have expressed surprise.

My advice is write what you need to write. And if you are a woman writing about gay men, just be prepared with your elevator speech as to why. Here’s mine: “My mother taught me to hate injustice. Besides, there is no rational reason to fear homosexuality, and yet so many people do. Psychology, social conditioning, fundamentalist religion – this is rich territory for an author.”

Good luck!